Matt Blaze


Matt Blaze is a researcher in the areas of secure systems, cryptography, and trust management. He is currently the McDevitt Chair of Computer Science and Law at Georgetown University, and is on the board of directors of the Tor Project.

Work

Blaze received his PhD in Computer Science from Princeton University.
In 1992, while working for AT&T, Blaze implemented a strong cryptographic package known as "CFS", the Cryptographic File System, for Unix, since ported to Linux. CFS uses Network File System as its transport mechanism, allowing users to encrypt selected directory hierarchies, but mount them unencrypted after providing the key. In November, 1993, he presented a paper on this project, "A Cryptographic File System for Unix", at the 1st ACM Conference on Computer and Communications Security. Blaze also published a paper "Key Management in an Encrypting File System", in the Proceedings USENIX Summer 1994 Technical Conference.
In the early 1990s, at the height of the "crypto war", Blaze was a participant in the Cypherpunks mailing list and in 1994, he found a critical weakness in the wiretapping mechanisms of the Clipper chip.
His paper, Protocol Failure in the Escrowed Encryption Standard, pointed out that the Clipper's escrow system had a serious vulnerability: a brute-force attack could allow the Clipper chip to be used as an encryption device, while disabling the key escrow capability. Later during this time, he was one of the authors of a seminal paper on calculating secure key lengths.
After leaving Bell, Blaze was an Associate Professor of Computer and Information Science at the University of Pennsylvania from 2004 to 2018. He then joined the faculty at Georgetown University, on a joint appointment at Georgetown Law and the Department of Computer Science.
In July 2016, the complete board of the Tor Project resigned and announced a new board, including Matt Blaze.
In 2018, crypto Visa card company Monaco paid Blaze an undisclosed amount for the rights to the domain Crypto.com.

Education